Talk:Jeanna Giese

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[edit] How

How do you pronounce her first name? is it ji-anna, or more like jina? Omer Enbar 09:27, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

I was just watching a documentary about her - the family say gene-ah. Cool Z 22:04, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Correction

The article read as follows: "She is only the sixth person known to have survived rabies after the onset of symptoms; the other survivors were vaccinated before symptoms developed." This is fundamentally incorrect. Being vaccinated before symptoms start is hardly unusual. Unless I am insane (which I doubt I am), these people suffered from vaccine failures. Giese is remarkable for being the first entirely unvaccinated person to survive. --Trafton 07:36, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I believe the old sentence was trying to explain that the other survivors had recieved the rabies vaccine, whereas Ms. Giese was the first survivor who had never received any vaccine, which you have now made more clear. The important part was not so much that the other survivors were vaccinated BEFORE the onset of symptoms (as opposed to after), which as you note is the usual way vaccines work, but that they received the vaccine, they came down with symptomatic rabies anyway, and that their survival was probably because the vaccine had some positive effect. In any case, your rewording is less ambiguous, and you're not insane. Good edit.

I haven't had time to look into whether the debate on the reasons she survived has progressed, so if anyone has the time and interest to check out the literature, I think it would be a good addition to the article. Loremipsum 03:49, 27 April 2006 (UTC)


I believe that the other survivors received the vaccine after suspicion of being exposed to rabies but before any symptoms of the disease presented. Despite their getting the vaccination before symptoms arose, they came down with the disease and then survived. Perhaps, despite the failure of the vaccination, they still had some protection (maybe by weakening the effect of the virus or something). Jeanna was the first person to have survived without receiving a vaccination. -jmmenoyo 7:26, 29 October 2006(CST)

[edit] Prayer Paragraph

I'm going to make my biases explicit, and look for some guidance from more experienced Wikipedians: I do not support the recently added paragraph that attributes Ms. Giese's survival to a "prayer circle." I personally do not believe in the power of intercessory prayer to heal the terminally ill, but my personal beliefs are separate from my argument for why this comment should not be included in the article.

First, there is no reference to any sort of world-wide, mass prayer for Jeanna. Googling '"Jeanna Giese" prayer' finds evidence that students at her school prayed for her, but until there is some way of documenting the size of the prayer circle phenomenon, I don't think it is verifiable or fair to claim that the prayer circle was "large", or even that her story is "popular among Christians". ("Large" and "popular" are both tricky words - an objective measure would be best.) I'm not saying that we shouldn't include a reference to the power of prayer unless we can quantify the phenomenon, but I'm not seeing *any* evidence that it was large. Many references discuss her survival in the context of the power of prayer, but these were written after her recovery.

Second, including the reference to prayer in the article - which also states that there is no conclusive explanation for Ms. Giese's survival - falsely gives the impression that there is no medical explanation for her survival. Although her reasons for survival are controversial, controversy in the medical community does not imply that the only reasonable explanation is the supernatural. Even if many people did pray for Jeanna, her survival after many people prayed for her does not automatically warrant a mention. (Certainly one could think of many terminally ill people who were prayed for who did not survive - does this warrant a mention on their wikipedia page?) Absent any suggestion of why the Giese case was special (a special kind of prayer, and especially large number of people, etc.) any indication that she might have survived because of prayer is an implicit suggestion that prayer was the cause of her survival. Jbrukh's edits help, but it still seems misleading to me.

I certainly do not mean to trivialize anyone's religious beliefs, and I don't want to start a religious battle on the Wikipedia page of this remarkable girl. But I don't think it's fair to falsely leave readers with the impression that this is a particularly remarkable or noteworthy case of "the power of prayer."

I am going to edit the article to include a reference to the "power of prayer" angle, but make it more "personal" by including a quote from her father. Your feedback on how to approach this sensitive issue is welcomed. Loremipsum 00:16, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

On a related note, I removed the statement that the power of prayer could not be disproven. The scientific method cannot be used to prove a negative, making the statement redundant. --Kesh 18:25, 3 July 2006 (UTC)
Someone recently decided the "prayer passage" was unencyclopedic and removed it. While I wish they had mentioned something on the talk page, I'm inclined to agree with them, and I'm not about to lose any sleep over it. Loremipsum 03:24, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

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[edit] WikiProject class rating

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